by Sarah Helm
In October, Betsie and Corrie ten Boom, the elderly Dutch sisters, had been struck off the Siemens lists and sent back to level ground inside the camp wall. Betsie had started coughing up blood and could only shovel tiny amounts; the guards mocked her by snatching her spade and taunting her as ‘Madame Baroness’, and prisoners laughed at her too.
To Corrie’s astonishment Betsie too was laughing. ‘But you’d better let me totter along with my little spoonful or I’ll have to stop altogether,’ she said, at which the guard lashed out with a whip, leaving raw marks across Betsie’s neck. ‘Don’t look at it, Corrie,’ said Betsie. ‘Look at Jesus instead.’
Chapter 29
Doctor Loulou
By mid-November 1944 the women who arrived on the last Paris convoy were laying slabs of sod in the snow at a desolate subcamp called Königsberg, 150 miles east of Ravensbrück. The sheltered potato cellar at Torgau, the gifts of Jack Frost sugar, seemed like a dream. Most had given up hoping for the end of the war. ‘Instead we hoped for the end of winter, because we could count on it,’ said Virginia Lake, who was now keeping a diary.
At Königsberg they were building an airfield, but the sods of earth would not lie flat on the snow; once it iced up the squares became impossible to shift. Some days there’d be a thaw and the sods had to be laid in the water. They floundered in the mud to lay it right. Then it would all freeze over again and they’d be hacking at the ice. In fact, it was an impossible job. Everyone knew that the ground would never be level.
They were famished by now, as well as cold. Just three months after leaving Paris, the women still had a little fat in reserve, though it was fast disappearing. When they marched onto the aviation field, blasts of icy wind pierced their thin clothes. The women robbed mattresses of straw and stuffed handfuls down each other’s sweaters.
At Neubrandenburg subcamp, fifty miles north of Ravensbrück, Micheline Maurel had not an ounce of fat left on her, having been here nearly two years. She too was keeping a diary. Her entry of 29 October reads: ‘Sunday: My bread ration stolen in washroom.’ 13 November: ‘First snow, ate nothing.’ 14 November: ‘Very cold. It’s freezing. So sad.’ Then her diary stops for good and she started praying to God to let her die. Micheline had constant dysentery and yet was eating nothing. ‘I wished I could let myself go and disappear completely. On the spot. I called for my mother. By this time I had no flesh, the skin hung in dry folds over my bones.’
All the subcamps were killing, but Königsberg was new, a ‘punishment camp’; it killed fast. In the autumn of 1944 prisoners became aware that Königsberg, along with the new subcamps of Rechlin and Malchow, were particularly abominable places. Women sent here did not work in well-equipped arms factories like those at the subcamp of Torgau. The work was hard labour of the worst kind and the prisoners were clearly expected to work to their last breath and then die.
One look at Königsberg and the women could see that nothing there could long sustain life. The barracks rattled in the wind and the guards seemed mediocre, as if they were dispensable too. It might not even matter to the Germans if the work on the airfield was completed or not. It was just meant to break those who did it.
Even the civilian foreman seemed to grasp this. In the bitterest cold, seeing they were at the end of their endurance, he took pity and allowed the women to make a fire on the airfield. They could spend five minutes by it one by one, but there were those who refused to leave it. ‘And though our foreman threatened to strike, he never did—he only stamped out the blaze. That was the worst blow he could have given,’ said Virginia.
Real hunger soon gripped Königsberg. A girl fell while hurrying back from the soup wagon and lost all her soup. Everyone knew what this meant; they gave her one, two, three spoons of their own ‘because it was giving life’. Eyes grew dull, cheeks hollow, skin turned grey and limbs were no longer round. ‘Mina, a beautiful strong young Swiss woman, in two months had become a wrinkled bent and haggard old lady; she had lost her morale and had to be led about like a very young child,’ said Virginia.
The tougher Slavs lasted longer. They’d been chosen for Königsberg because they were surplus to requirements in the factories on a particular day, and often such women were quickly moved on. Some at Königsberg specifically came for punishment. The French, and the handful of Americans and British, were here to pay for joining the protest at Torgau. Most of the women sent to the punishment camps had already been exhausted in the sewing shop, or perhaps at Siemens. Their last ounce of strength could now be eked out on digging, clearing and chopping. Amongst the 500 or so women at Königsberg many were from the Warsaw Uprising group, who had already been weakened in the tent.
Many lost their minds first. Before the snows came there was a potato patch at the end of the field and sometimes you could steal potatoes. One day a Polish woman crept there and was seen by one of the guards, who warned her to come back. ‘Perhaps she didn’t hear or perhaps she was partly mad. Anyway he shot her in the back and she died right there on the ground,’ recalled Virginia.
Those driven out of their minds were put with the hopelessly sick to be shipped back to die. Micheline Maurel recalled some of the French going ‘mad’. The Marin sisters ran a little café in Lyon. One of them died at the subcamp and the other ‘went mad’ and was sent back to Ravensbrück.
Back at the main camp the prisoners often saw the trucks coming in from the subcamps. The dead, the nearly dead and the ‘mad’ were dumped by the Revier, where they were sorted. The first time the French doctor Loulou Le Porz saw this she was standing with her friend Violette Lecoq, a French Red Cross nurse.
It was night and the electric light suddenly came on. We were by the big gates…I said to Violette: ‘If one day someone makes a film they must film this scene. This night. This moment.’ Because there we were—a little nurse from Paris and a young doctor all the way from Bordeaux. There was a lorry that suddenly arrives and it turns around and reverses towards us. And it lifts up and it tips out a whole pile of corpses. We were there because we’d just taken one of our dead to the mortuary. And suddenly we were in front of a mountain of bodies. And if we recount that one day, we said to each other, nobody would believe us. And they didn’t. When we came back, nobody wanted to know.
The dead were carted off to the crematorium, while the nearly dead were often sent to Loulou’s block, Block 10. Many died in her arms.
—
Before Loulou even entered Block 10 it was clear to her that this was no hospital block but a type of mortuary. When she first started work, Oberschwester Marschall told her:
‘We don’t waste medicines on the TB patients,’ and she gave me none. And when I entered I looked around and saw 400 dying or dead women, lying on mattresses, crammed into the block. And here was I, a doctor, with nothing to treat them with. It was an abomination. An anteroom to death.
You see, they called it a hospital block but that was a piece of theatre—a theatre of marionettes, and we who worked there were to be their puppets. They weren’t yet using gas, but we knew these women had been selected for death.
The camp hospital had always had a dual role of cure and kill, but in the autumn of 1944, just as some subcamps were being categorised ‘punishment camps’, a decision was taken to differentiate between regular Revier blocks where prisoners might be treated for sickness, and those where they were left to die. The regular blocks were now called workers’ blocks. The other Revier blocks had no name, but people knew their numbers and knew they were death blocks. At the Hamburg trial in 1946, the prosecution called what happened in these blocks ‘neglect killing’. By any name, the deliberate killing introduced in the autumn of 1944 was a new and concerted method of mass murder.
That the TB block was the first death block was no surprise: the Nazis had always dreaded tuberculosis, linked in their minds with dirt and degenerates. And yet, if the purpose was death, why send a prisoner doctor, a TB specialist, to work there?
—
Louis
e ‘Loulou’ Le Porz was a posthumous child: her father was killed in the first days of the First World War. Raised by her mother as a Catholic, Loulou knew she wanted to be a doctor from a very young age, and chose infectious diseases as a specialism, caring for the poor. When the Germans entered Bordeaux in 1940 her father was very much on her mind. A friend, a surgeon in the same hospital, asked if she wanted to help and put her in touch with a resistance cell that collected intelligence for the British on shipping movements in Bordeaux. On capture she spent three months in solitary confinement in the city’s Gestapo cells before being sent to Ravensbrück. She was twenty-nine years old when she arrived there in June 1944.
Loulou has no idea why she was chosen for the Block 10 job. ‘People said it was all ordered in the camps, but it wasn’t like that. It struck me very quickly that in fact there was often no rhyme or reason about the way things happened. Things were quite unpredictable in the camp. You must remember that.’ She had her suspicions: she might have received the appointment because Carmen Mory, the Blockova there, wanted to recruit her. There is reason to believe that Loulou was right.
By the autumn of 1944 Mory was probably the most powerful prisoner in the camp. She was also the most feared and had variously been nicknamed Vulgaris—common wolf; Schwarzer Engel—black angel; and The Witch. Once one of Treite’s protégées, her power had grown ever since she was taken on by Ramdohr.
Mory was born near Berne in 1906, her father a wealthy, well-connected doctor. Her mother died when Carmen was three. A talented but precocious child, educated at different boarding schools, she spoke several languages fluently and spent her twenties flitting around European capitals before moving to Berlin in the 1930s and taking up freelance journalism. By 1938 she had been recruited by German intelligence and sent to France to spy on German communist exiles. Arrested by the French, she was sentenced by a Paris court to death, accused of passing secrets of the Maginot Line, but her sentence was commuted and she was jailed instead. When the Germans took France in May 1940, they released her and sent her back to Berlin, but Mory must have fallen foul of her German handlers, because by 1941 she was in Ravensbrück, where Ramdohr found her invaluable.
Even Binz feared her, primarily because Mory’s patron was the sworn enemy and constant rival of Binz’s lover, Edmund Bräuning, Suhren’s deputy. Binz in turn tried to keep Carmen Mory down, sending her to the Bock for twenty-five lashes on at least one occasion, and for a while to the bunker. Once she was ‘freed’ both Treite and Ramdohr supported her appointment as Blockova of Block 10. From Treite’s point of view, she was a good candidate, as she had herself suffered from TB and was therefore immune. For Ramdohr, Mory would be more useful as a spy if she held a Blockova’s job.
By October 1944 Mory had built up so much power as Blockova that she was even in a position to recruit her own staff. She preferred to hire the French, in part, it seems, to set up a rival power base to the Poles and Austrians whom she detested, precisely because they too had power.*1 By October 1944 she had secured jobs for three French women inside Block 10, but she wanted to hire more; in particular she wanted to recruit the tall fair French woman who was accused by guards of looking proud and who she knew from the file held in Ramdohr’s office was a doctor.
Loulou clearly recalls when Carmen Mory first tried to recruit her; she was lying in the infectious diseases block, recovering from scarlet fever.
One fine day Mory appeared at the window by my bed and started talking to me. She didn’t say much but she was obviously testing me out. I already knew who she was—everyone did. She was very distinctive and attractive in her way—striking, with brown hair, always curled and darkish skin—a little oriental-looking. I said nothing. One distrusted everyone in the camp. One never knew how it might end up. And people said Mory had once been a German spy.
Mory’s first attempt to recruit Loulou came to nothing, probably because of the French woman’s illness, but by late October Loulou had fully recovered—she was one of a number of prisoners who had such strong constitutions that they resisted sickness, and even the starvation diet didn’t set her health back. ‘So Mory came to me again, and this time she told me she had fixed it for me to work as the doctor in Block Ten,’ said Loulou.
One reason Mory needed Loulou was for form-signing in the block. Under the new rules, every Revier block—even the death blocks—had to have a prisoner doctor, if only to sign the death notices. Neglect killing had to be officially registered like other deaths, and there were so many such deaths now that SS medics didn’t have time to sign all the forms. Mory had recruited another prisoner doctor, a young Swiss woman called Anne Spoerry, who should have been able to carry out the task, but Spoerry, it emerged, was not fully qualified. The daughter of a Swiss textile magnate, she had trained as a doctor in Paris but was arrested for resistance activity before taking her final exams. As a result, SS rules meant she couldn’t sign the forms.
Nevertheless, Mory wished to keep Spoerry in the block. The older Swiss woman had grown attached to Spoerry, and the two shared a mattress in Mory’s Blockova cubicle. Slight, with cropped brown hair, Anne Spoerry was known by the French as a loner and she unsettled her comrades by following Mory everywhere and taking on a false name, calling herself ‘Claude’. The other women believed ‘Claude’ was infatuated with Mory, though she herself would say later she was ‘bewitched’. Loulou, who still uses Spoerry’s camp name today, says she mistrusted ‘Claude’ from the start. ‘We saw how close she was to Mory, so we knew it was dangerous to have any contact at all.’
It may therefore have been simply because the younger doctor couldn’t sign the death forms that Mory recruited Loulou as well. ‘Although there may have been other reasons too,’ adds Loulou. ‘Mory only ever told half-truths and the rest was whatever she wanted it to be. Perhaps she was impressed with my title: Doctor of Medicine. I found out later that her own father was a doctor in Switzerland—it was said he had killed her mother but one never knew.’ Whatever the reason, it was thanks to Carmen Mory that Loulou, an earnest young TB specialist from Bordeaux, found herself working now in the first death block in Ravensbrück.
—
When Loulou started work in Block 10 there were two French nurses already working there: Violette Lecoq and Jacqueline Héreil. At the outbreak of war Violette nursed soldiers at the front for the French Red Cross, then she joined a resistance cell, and after capture spent a year in solitary confinement at Fresnes Prison. She arrived at Ravensbrück with the vingt-sept mille. Jacqueline Héreil, also a trained nurse, had worked for an escape line; she came in May. These three now shared a bunk: Loulou in the middle, Violette below and Jacqueline above, with ‘our sick all around us’. They instantly became friends and set about organising the care of those in the block.
Mory and Spoerry’s private cubicle was in the middle of the block and curtained off. ‘We didn’t see them so much at first. They prowled the camp outside or came in and stayed in their cubicle. I don’t know what they did in there—what they pleased. In any case it didn’t concern us. We had to attend to our sick and our dead.’
Without medicines or anything else, there was little they could do ‘except watch the little German who delivered the soup, and make sure she didn’t steal it’.
But of course we had our hands, our eyes and ears. So we used those. We divided up the block, and each morning we visited our patients and listened to them, and talked to them. We spoke no common language—many of our patients were Poles and Russians—but we often found an interpreter. And we had a sort of language of gestures. We told them we were doctors and nurses, and that gave them confidence, though we had nothing to prove it, except Violette, who had a thermometer tied round her neck on a string.
She’d been told by the Oberschwester that if she lost it she’d go to the bunker, so she had a pocket full of spare ones too. It made no difference what their temperatures were, as we couldn’t give them anything. One day Violette spilled them all and shrieked with
laughter, asking what would the Oberschwester do with her now? But Marschall never came into the block, so she wouldn’t know. None of the SS came into Block Ten because they were terrified of the sick. That was one advantage we had.
And our patients could see we weren’t frightened of them, which helped them in some way. Our sick women didn’t have to stand for Appell because they couldn’t. This was another advantage. When the guards came every morning and asked for the numbers, we passed them over at the door.
They were only interested in numbers—always counting us. But we kept our lists of names. Jacqueline used to go round each day and write down the names of every patient, which she kept in a book, where I noted my diagnoses too. When someone died we carried the body to the washroom to wait for the cart, but Jacqueline would always try to get a lock of our dead friend’s hair before they were taken away. She kept it carefully with the book to give to the family if we got home.
It wasn’t always easy to get the lock of hair because the bodies were piled so high in the washroom by then. The book was taken from Jacqueline just before the end.
By this time, however, Loulou herself had stored countless names of the sick and the dead in her own head. She can recount them even now, with the names of their husbands and children, and their diagnoses. Because although Loulou claims there was nothing she could do, she did a great deal. She diagnosed each woman’s condition, and contacted her friend the radiologist so that X-rays could be taken. She also smuggled in medicines with the help of a Yugoslavian pharmacist who received medicines meant for the SS and put some aside for Loulou.
‘I could have helped so many more.’ She leaned forward and suddenly brightened as she exclaimed that in her block there were women ‘of such courage you can’t imagine’. There was a brilliant pianist called Geneviève Tillier, ‘une femme adorable’, who had a lesion on her thumb. ‘We knew she would never play again, but she could easily have been cured.’ And there was Anne-Marie Cormerais, who had ‘a transverse myelitis of the lung, but no lesion, and could certainly have survived’.
